What happens if a designer within the world of fashion encourages political activism? Otto von Busch describes a designer role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. On Friday October 24th 2008 he defends his thesis at the School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg.

This social design practice can be called “the hacktivism of fashion”, an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship.

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Text via HDK-School of Design and Crafts

‘INTIMACY′ is a fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled ‘Intimacy White’ and ‘Intimacy Black’ are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.

Social interactions determine the garmentsʼ level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.

INTIMACY 2.0 features Studio Roosegaardeʼs new, wearable dresses composed of leather and smart e-foils which are daringly perfect to wear on the red carpet. In response to the heartbeat of each person, INTIMACY 2.0 becomes more or less transparent.

Currently Studio Roosegaarde is selecting haute couture designers to develop the next INTIMACY 3.0 fashion line for men and women.

Specifications: 2010-2011. ʻBlackʼ and ʻWhiteʼ dresses, length 100cm, width 40 cm. Smart foils, wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media.

WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, also known as WET Magazine, or simply WET, was originally published between 1976-81 in Venice, California by Leonard Koren. The story behind the making of WET is the subject of Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing.

“Communicating Bacteria” is a new collaboration between Anna Dumitriu, Dr Simon Park and Dr John Paul, which explores new research currently being undertaken in the field of bacterial communication through the development of an art installation that combines bioart, textiles and video projections.

Bacteria have intricate communication capabilities, for example: quorum sensing (voting on issues affecting the colony and signaling their presence to other bacteria); chemotactic signaling (detecting harmful or favorable substances in the environment); and plasmid exchange (e.g. for transfer of antibiotic resistance genes). This is now being investigated as a form of social intelligence as it is realized that these so called ‘simplest’ of life forms can work collectively, obtain information about their environment (and other cells) and use that information in a ‘meaningful’ way. Using signaling chemicals such as Homoserine Lactone, the bacteria pass on messages to nearby cells, which can be either part of their colony or other living cells (including eukaryotic and plant cells).

Dumitriu’s long-term artistic practice is focused around microbiology and collaborative practice – Communicating Bacteria builds strongly on Dumitriu’s earlier collaborative work. Dumitriu will work using this new area of research as a basis for the development of a body of new work that will include textile designs with dyes made from bacteria that change color dependent on the behavior and communication of bacteria, crochet patterns based on bacterial responses, interactive interventions that are modeled according to the behavior and communication across bacteria.

Text via Anna Dumitriu

The No Image Commercials were originally conceived as a back-story for the girlfriend character (played by Busy Gangnes) in the No Image performance who mysteriously dies. The idea was to imagine this character as having a career as an actress and so she lives on in these commercial sequences. We drew from the narrative this idea that she committed suicide because she was tired of being a stay at home girlfriend. We wanted the commercials to reflect the sensibility of the stay-at-home mom.

The Pharmaceutical Commercial references an amalgamation of commercials targeting everything from ant-depressants to Glade air fresheners. We were most interested in an existing commercial that presented a dilemma between the comfort of being inside and the dangerous, allergy-filled outside. Only a drug could help you bridge the gap. We thought this really connected with the depressed girlfriend character and her dilemma with her relationship. She was seemingly stuck inside and powerless to get out. The product the commercial is selling helps the consumer straddle that line in a state of harmony (or confinement). The room setting, designed by Shawn Maximo, incorporates objects from past, present and future Yemenwed projects. This helps to tie it further into the narrative taking place as viewers can see the similarity between the items on stage and in the commercial.

Via YEMENWED

Dukno Yoon: Intrigued by machines and their movements, mechanical structure has become the most crucial formal language throughout my body of work. Mechanical structure as a form fascinates me in two aspects. First, structural form can achieve complexity yet simplicity at once because of the ingrained logic behind it. Additionally, mechanical forms involve movement that is not random, but rather is designed or devised, and thus can be interactive. Working in particular with mechanical movements that interact with and involve viewers allows me to give vitality to objects. My wearable/kinetic works are intended to exist between jewelry and sculpture. They stand independently while their close connection to the body creates an intimate relationship with the viewer.

Constrained Wings : Built upon wind-up movement taken from an antique metronome, this piece transforms the rhythmic pendulum movement to flapping and floating wings.

Via Department of Art. Kansas State University

On July 20, 1969, the bodies of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were protected from a lunar vacuum by only twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of “Playtex”—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Spacesuit tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. The book touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior’s New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK’s carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA’s Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. Through it all, the twenty-one-layer spacesuit offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Nicholas de Monchaux, the author of this book, is an architect and urbanist whose work concerns the nature of cities. He is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley, and has worked as with Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller + Scofidio in New York.
de Monchaux’s design work and criticism have been published in Architectural Design, Log, the New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. His parametric study of ecologically transformed “gutterspace,” Local Code/Real Estates, was a finalist in the WPA 2.0 Competition in 2009 and was featured at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas.

Text taken from Fashioning Apollo

A Night-time Snowboarding Short Lights Up the Last of the Winter Snow

Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice. “I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source.” Sutton, who has created work for the likes of Hermès, Burberry and The New York Times, spent three nights on a skidoo with his trusty Red Epic camera at temperatures of -25C to snap Hughes carving effortlessly through the deep snow, even enlisting his own father to help maintain the temperamental suit throughout the demanding shoot. “Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding,” says Hughes of the charged salopettes. “Luckily there was plenty of vin rouge to keep me warm, and Jacob’s enthusiasm kept everyone going through the cold nights.”

Via NOWNESS

This animation was realized on the Motion cabinet by Niels Hoebers.

‘Overade’ is a foldable urban bike helmet, designed by Patrick Jouffret of french design studio agency 360 in collaboration with engineer Philippe Arrouart. The device provides as much protection as a standard bicycle helmet but folds up to a compact, easily transportable size when not in use. Small enough to slip into a purse or backpack, the design aims to address the low percentage of urban bicyclists who utilize helmets. First prototyped in 2010, ‘Overade’ is expected to enter commercial production within 2012.

Via Designboom

With these two concepts in mind, Otsuka and his team built a 2992 sq.ft. space using an array of white and cream hues with a large architectural element with in the space. We caught up with the architect who explained that the “interior space was a cylinder made with a structurally self-supporting mesh.” He noted that “because of the size of the feature I wanted to avoid integrating it too much with the surrounding space, so deliberately aligned it off center from the axis of the building.” By using this layout, the architectural portal became a strong design feature in the shop.

The floor was hand painted with original gold paint, while the walls and ceiling were finished in an acrylic emulsion paint.

Text and Images via Knstrct

Last year, Vice travelled to Matehuala, Mexico in search of dance crews who wear extremely pointy cowboy boots called botas vaqueras exóticas.

Vice: Last month we went to the dusty city of Matehuala, Mexico, in the northern state of San Luís Potosí on the high plateau of the Huasteca Potosina, in search of the pointiest long-toed cowboy boots ever made. Over the past year, the botas vaqueras exóticas phenomenon has overrun the rodeo dance floors and clubs of this area, much to the dissatisfaction of Mexicans who critique the fashions of their countrymen on hotly trafficked style blogs.

We’d seen the occasional report about the exotic pointy-boot trend making its way stateside, spreading into Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and other places where big groups of immigrant Mexicans have taken root, and we expected that the odds were pretty low that the style had phased out of Mexico completely. So we made our way to Mesquit Rodeo and Desierto Light, two cowboy venues in Matehuala, where party promoters host dance-offs to music known as tribal guarachero. Essentially, this sound is a combination of thumpy house music, ancient Hispanic chants and flute work, and Colombian dance songs known as cumbia.

Photo by Edith Valle. Via VICE

Wearable displays have been used to make a high-tech game of tag, and some have been made into tattoos. One tinkerer in Arizona decided to make one that could be worn as a jacket and show his favorite characters from The Simpsons.

David Forbes, an electrical engineer by trade, wanted to build something really cool to wear at the Burning Man festival. So he re-purposed a relatively simple flexible circuit board covered with LEDs. He made the first with 30 rows of four LEDs each and then contracted a manufacturer to build 175 more of them. He attached them to an old coat and was able to build a display with a 160 x 120 resolution, which he notes on his blog is exactly

Part of the set-up is the same kind of chip used to scale down the images for security cameras, and another is the same type of chip used to control the big LED signs used for advertisements. Adding a small set of circuits that convert the video output of the iPod to the smaller resolution, he was able to put together his wearable display.

The only down side seems to be getting through airports. Forbes also noted that he wasn’t able to create a pair of pants, as the curves over the thighs proved complicated. But he has designed vests.

If you want a coat like this it will be expensive, largely due to the cost of the LEDs. For $39,995 Forbes will make you one that is a full wrap-around display; a front-only will set you back $24,995. Wait time is about four months.

Besides creating a walking billboard one idea is to attach a camera that transmits a picture of the scene on one side of the wearer, creating a kind of optical camouflage. On the other hand, it could be great dance club wear — this might be a big seller among trance music and Daft Punk fans. Text by Jesse Emspak. Via Discovery News

MIRA KAMDAR: The French have found a way to cope with the unrelenting bad economic news in Europe: escape to India. Not the real India but a fantasy land far removed from the realities of sinking currencies and credit-rating downgrades.

Paris metro stations are papered with huge posters for “Rani,” this year’s Christmas-season television special about the improbable adventures of a dispossessed marquise in 18th-century France and India. While, for a much more elite public, the house of Chanel unveiled on Dec. 6 to 200 handpicked guests, including Frieda Pinto and Sonam Kapoor, its Paris-Bombay collection at a sumptuous durbar in the Grand Palais.

The title “Rani” is helpfully translated for the French public as “the Hindi word for the raja’s wife.” The raja, who makes the French renegade Jolanne de Valcourt his wife, is played by Hrithik Roshan, the only name Indian actor in the series. The lead role is played by French actress Mylène Jampanoi who was married in real-life to Indian model and actor Milind Sonam. Continue HERE

Jenna Sauers: The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and “completely virtual,” the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then “dresses” it by drawing on its clothes, and digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models’ faces won’t be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we’ll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn’t looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can’t say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn’t racially diverse. Via Jezebel